Of Skin Deep: Beauty

Beauty is convention and as with all conventions someone decided that a beautiful person has this particular structure, skin tone, hair length and style and sometimes even a certain figure bank balance.

“How deep must beauty be? Do you want to see an X-ray of my heart, liver and pancreas…. beneath our skin arent we all the same?

I have never been one to pay too much heed to conventions, especially conventions which define how I should feel, think and behave. Stereotypes are conventions too.

I remember a game we used to play in kindergarten, we would sing and each person got to choose and describe their sweetheart:

Sarura wako Wangu Mutsvuku

(Choose yours mine is light skinned…)

The lighter skin toned always got picked first, but it was all a game, right? No, not really, this how you get conditioned to believe something and then grow up to start a complexion altering regime. Some blame it on mental colonisation, that we have been oppressed for so long we started believing that black is bad and white is good. Maybe we were always that way…….

You may have far too many curves in far too many places or none at all but its ok just as your complexion could be a deep sun-kissed shade of melanin or like the sea at sunset as the sun dissolves and that’s ok too, the world has a habit of loving back people who love themselves.

My beard started going grey early in my life, I suffered through multiple dye efforts and then finally decided to stop fighting my genetics. I walk in the street I notice people trying hard not stare, I smile back even wave sometimes and some brave souls ask me if I know my beard is grey and I act shocked for the fun of it….

When I walk with my uncle he always says I make him feel bad, he says he holds on to a semblance of youth so he dyes his hair and beard religiously (don’t try to figure out which one he is ha! And if he stumbles across my blog its ok to dye or not to dye)